Hawaii Outdoor Auto Grow

Week four has brought some disappointment. The Blackberry plant has started to flower. What I thought were preflowers forming never stopped and the top is not growing new nodes. It looks like I'll be lucky to get a few grams off of her by the time she's done. I am quite impressed with the dark color of the calyxes. The Mexican Airlines is growing at the same slow rate, but hasn't yet developed preflowers and looks like it is still vegetating. I decided to try a little LST with them, and it doesn't seem to have bothered them. Both plants seem healthy, but both seem to be rather small for their age. My thoughts are that the medium I'm using doesn't drain well enough so the girls have had wet feet since day one and since the medium doesn't dry out, I don't feel I should water them. What this has meant is that I've only fed them 1/4 strenght nutes once during week 2. The only other thing I can think of is my lighting. I have them outdoors during daylight hours and they share a 30w daylight LED spotlight at 12" at night for about 6 hours. I don't think the LED does much, but daylight maxes out at 13 hours with 6-8 hours of direct sunlight when not cloudy. Lacking any experience with autoflowers I have no idea if this is enough sunlight for them to grow large outdoors. I'm popping seeds to try again and plan to use a 70/30 perlite/coco mix in 3 gal hempy buckets. I figure this will allow the medium to drain and dry more quickly, and allow me to feed more regularly. Anyone have thoughts or suggestions?